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Keep Your Left Up

Q. I'm an admirer of the artist George Bellows, and my favorite of his fight pictures is "Stag at Sharkey's." Can you tell me what and where Sharkey's was?

A. Sharkey's was one of New York's on-again, off-again athletic clubs. That is, it was a saloon on Columbus Avenue near West 67th Street, near Bellows's studio and what is now Lincoln Center, according to "Upper West Side Story," by Peter Salwen (Abbeville Press, 1989).

The place was run by Sailor Tom Sharkey, who sported battleship tattoos and fought Bob Fitzsimmons for the heavyweight championship. As the boxing historian Bert Sugar explained in an interview, back when boxing was mostly illegal in New York State, a loophole allowed athletic clubs to stage fights. (Remember the phrase "club fighter"?) So on fight nights, the saloon became an athletic club. Patrons paid a "membership fee" of $1 to get into the back room, where the fights were staged.

In the 1909 painting "Stag at Sharkey's," in which two fighters have at each other, Bellows heightened the power of the almost barbaric scene by blurring its details. Sailor Tom died in San Francisco in 1953.

A. Thomas F. Foley, for whom the square northeast of City Hall was named, was a saloonkeeper, a Tammany leader on the Lower East Side and a political mentor to Al Smith.

Foley, who was born in 1852, left school at age 13 to support his widowed mother, working for a time as a blacksmith's helper. Although he served as a member of the old City Council, as alderman and as sheriff, he generally avoided elected office, preferring to sponsor others.

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In "The Power Broker," Robert A. Caro wrote of Foley: " 'Big Tom' was a square-shaped, mustachioed, quiet man who spent most of each day at the Downtown Tammany Club listening to the cries for help -- for a boy who had been arrested, for a process server who had been fired, for a policeman who had been shifted to a Staten Island beat -- with unfailing patience. Although his saloons thrived, he was to die a poor man, their profits trickling, along with the payoffs and the campaign contributions, through his fingers into those of his constituents."

Foley's lasting gift to his party and his country was to choose the young Alfred E. Smith, whose speaking style and loyalty Foley admired, as a candidate for the State Assembly in 1903. Smith rose to be speaker, then governor and, in 1928, the Democratic candidate for president.

At Foley's death in 1925, Governor Smith said, "My personal and political welfare were as much a matter of concern to him as though I were his own son." Foley Square, the site of his last saloon and political gathering place, was named for him by the Board of Aldermen in 1926.

Splish, Splash

Q. I'm a non-New Yorker who was a fan of the television show "Friends," and I have always thought that the fountain shown in opening credits is in Gramercy Park. Am I correct?

A. No way. Gramercy Park, a private park, is locked except to shareholders and guests, and its privacy is jealously guarded. In fact, the opening sequence, in which the stars dance in a fountain, was shot on a Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, Calif., said a Warner Bros. spokesman, Gary Mednick. The fountain was just a prop. MICHAEL POLLAK

F. Y. I. E-mail: fyi@nytimes.com

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